Marc Lajoie
@lajoiemedia.bsky.social
Independent. Recently professor of data journalism at George Washington University's @SMPAGWU. Ex-@barronsonline, @CBCRadioCanada, @SCMP_News, @WSJ.
Ballroom-size scoop from @washingtonpost.com’s Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey and @aaronschaffer.com: the secret list of major donors to Trump’s flagship project Among the revelations — $25M apiece from Apple and Nvidia, and numerous gifts from people + firms with business before Trump
Secret documents reveal donors behind $330 million for Trump’s ballroom
The records offer a panoramic view of a fundraising campaign that is extraordinary for its size and opacity.
washingtonpost.com
One of the good things about Bluesky is that none of its users think the discourse here is in any way representative of broader society
It's imperative we align human behavior to AI values
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 4w agoAnthropic bans users from ‘needless abusive or cruel behavior’ towards Claude
Working on a piece for the newsletter, this is a data point - smart people keep shrugging and saying “communities don’t like data centers because of ‘vibes’” etc when it’s really that people are in fact smart enough to know they are bad faith neighbors. It is *entirely rational* not to trust them.
Floodlight@floodlightnews.org · 2mo agoNEW: Thermal drone footage shows the Microsoft-backed DataOne AI data center in Vineland, NJ is running dozens of gas generators. None of them have permits. A Floodlight visual investigation with @us.theguardian.com:
Lazy and sloppy CBC. Trump renamed Lake Ontario? Did he? Does he have that authority? Are his executive orders omnipotent? Who decides the names of geographical features? Please do some journalism.
Samus would blow up the planet. And then maybe turn into a little ball.
Haus of Decline@hausofdecline.bsky.social · 3mo ago
Not a single word about how these tariffs violate both our WTO & USCMA obligations. Every time Trump does this, the NYT & other outlets simply write as if we live in an international vacuum, where the US has no obligations under signed, ratified international treaties. It's journalistic malpractice.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 4mo agoPresident Trump signed an order imposing a 50% tariff on a wide range of goods from Canada, including hockey sticks, wine and cement.
"Americans should take the president's anti-Canadian saber-rattling so much more seriously than we do. We should treat it not as a joke, not as a quirk . . . but as a genuine threat to our neighbors." @jamellebouie.net is exactly right www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPs9...
It is time to stop treating Donald Trump's anti-Canada rhetoric like a joke
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
youtube.com
Could Excel be conscious? We surveyed more than Jan 1 1900 people to find out.
🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft.
Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft - New Jersey Globe
The massive coalition of local newspaper publishers filed a federal lawsuit today against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the technology companies
newjerseyglobe.com
Technically, they’re Remains now.
Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · 4mo agoA fifth of Leave voters have died.
US investigative journalism title The Lever has increased free subscribers by 66% since 2025 after slowing its output in response to the frenetic pace of news during the second Trump presidency
How slow journalism is paying off for The Lever under Trump Two
The Lever is intentionally slowing down its output in response to the Trump-era news cycle having a higher bar for reader attention.
pressgazette.co.uk
This is enraging! This technology is actually taking us backwards, making us more primitive!
Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 5mo agoWhen utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.
The AI rollout is an incredible test case for the power of capital to overrule everything in its way. An overwhelmingly stupid, obscenely polluting, and wildly dangerous set of technologies are being brute-forced into every part of our lives because money says so.
By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.
Scott Pelley has provided @status.news a statement blasting current CBS News management and even accusing them of having tried (and failed) to "inject falsehoods and bias" into his stories. www.status.news/p/scott-pell...
They fired Scott Pelley, because of course they did, the cowards.
Uninterested in leading a pile-on but no, AI does not “have access” to everything ever published. Not archival material, obviously, but not secondary material either. Nor across times nor languages. AI is not human knowledge personified. It’s exactly not that, in fact. It’s not even a search engine.
Paramount+ wanted to use the image on the left as a poster for the wrath of Khan, so they used everyone's least favorite technology to generate the rest of the image.
Yup. I started wearing a mask on planes well before COVID. I just wanted to stop having my vacations ruined by a cold I picked up on the plane. It's so annoying that masks got politicized and that I now get dirty looks!
Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 6mo agoSome of us just don't like getting colds
pretty crazy how blatant the ending of the late show is just an act of government censorship lol
if someone does a coverup, that's consciousness of guilt and so Objective Journalists have an alibi for critical coverage. but if you just shoot someone in broad daylight, Peter Baker's hands are tied
squarely rooted@squarelyrooted.bsky.social · 6mo agoone thing that went wrong in our political media culture is that journalists so deeply internalized a backwards version of 'the cover-up is the crime' they assume that anything that's being done out in the open is just 'a thing that happened' that needs to be subjected to the 'objectivity' standard
So much of the AI-hyping LinkedIn fare is clearly written by AI. AI writing about itself, post after post. It's the world's first self-hyping technology, a perpetual motion machine of nonsense. (Potentially also a self-inflating economic bubble)
This is abhorrent. Trans students from the US are possibly being denied hormonal therapy in Canada because of a Trump executive order. Is Canada a sovereign country or not?
Steve Rukavina@steverukavina.bsky.social · 6mo agowww.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
For years, Edith Eger kept quiet, refusing to speak about the atrocities she faced and saw in Auschwitz. But by the time she was in her early 50s working as a clinical psychologist, she knew she had to heal herself first to truly help her patients.
Forced to dance for Mengele at Auschwitz, she was called to help others heal
Psychologist Edith Eger, who has died at 98, treated veterans and abuse victims. She had to heal herself first, she said, to truly help her patients.
washingtonpost.com